Sunday, August 14, 2011

Last week, Clark&Parsia released an initial integration between Stardog and Spring. To quote the Stardog site, Stardog is a commercial RDF database: insanely fast SPARQL query, transactions, and world-class OWL reasoning support. Of course, Spring provides a leading technology stack for rapid development of Java applications. Almost all projects support Spring integration in one form or another - with the exception of the Semantic Web technology stacks. So, working with C&P, we came up with an initial integration of Stardog and Spring.

Stardog-Spring 0.0.1 provides the initial groundwork for Spring developers to get started with Stardog, and in general, Semantic Web technology. Over time, the Stardog Spring integration will be expanded to support some of the larger enterprise capabilities from Spring, such as Spring Batch. Stardog-Spring is open source, available on Github, and licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

The implementations follow the standard design patterns used across the Spring Framework, so if you are familiar with JdbcTemplate, JmsTemplate, etc you will be right at home with the SnarlTemplate. The SnarlTemplate provides interface callbacks for querying, adding, and removing data - abstracting away the boilerplate connection handling and transaction handling for you. Likewise, the DataSource and the FactoryBean look and feel very much like SQL dataSource's and factory beans within Spring.

This implementation was built with Gradle, and you need edit the build.gradle file to point at your Stardog release for it to build. Of course Stardog-Spring works well with Spring Jena and Groovy SPARQL.

Last but not least, you will have to sign up with the Stardog testers to get the current version. Eventually there will be a community-style edition and enterprise style edition of Stardog.